AS one of Scotland’s top forensic scientists, Carol Weston has grown used to detaching herself from her emotions.

Carol says lab work is vital (Photo: Victoria Stewart)

She was the first scientist on the scene when the body of Polish student Angelika Kluk, 23, was found beneath the floorboards of a chapel in Glasgow. She had been horrifically murdered.

And she played a key role in the conviction of Marek Harcar, who dragged businesswoman Moira Jones, 40, off the street to rape and kill her in a park in the city in May 2008.

But when Carol, 39, found herself being chased through Glasgow by a stranger, her emotions welled up.

She admitted it’s because she knows more than most how lives can be changed – or lost – purely by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Carol had gone for a jog in the city centre at lunchtime when she suddenly found herself in a vulnerable position – in broad daylight.

She said: “I noticed this guy when I was out running and thought there was something about him that was a bit weird. He started running after me, chasing me through the streets.

“At the time I was thinking he could have a knife in his bag.

“I didn’t necessarily think about him grabbing me or interfering with me with any sexual motive but I am aware of seemingly random murders, people who’ve been walking along the street in the middle of the day and someone has come up and stabbed them.

“That was what was going through my head. I kept running and when I looked back, he wasn’t there.

“I reported it, not because what happened to me was really particularly that awful but because I had a feeling that the guy just wasn’t right.

“It turns out the police had been interested in him and he pled guilty to a charge of breach of the peace for chasing me up the street.”

The incident, startling as it was, is trivial by comparison to what Carol has dealt with in the past.

Her work is featured in new BBC Scotland documentary mini series Crime Scenes Scotland: Forensics Squad, which examines the role science has played in securing convictions in some of the country’s most high-profile murder trials.

While she’s at pains to point out that the majority of murders are drink or drug influenced, she has seen sights that would leave most of us unable to sleep at night, like coming across Angelika’s bloodied body folded under the floorboards of St Patrick’s Church in Anderston.

“You don’t become hardened to it,” she said. “You care very much, you know this is a young girl who has been violently murdered. But you become very focused and professional.

“It’s about knowing that something awful has happened to this girl and that it’s my responsibility to work very hard to catch who has done it.

“I have to go into a mode, thinking about how to collect fibres, DNA, whether or not to strip the body.

“It’s not until a good bit afterwards, when you’ve finished, that you start to think about it all emotionally.

“There have been times when I’ve been driving home from crime scenes in tears because what I've seen is so terrible. But mostly I‘m thinking about what I have to do next and can’t wait to get into the lab.”

Carol recalls being paged early on the Saturday morning soon after Angelika’s body had been found and how she attended a meeting with investigating officers before going anywhere near the scene.

“Because Angelika was under the floorboards and it was a pretty extraordinary crime scene, we had to have a meeting to decide upon a strategy to get near to the body.

“She was under a tiny hatch, inaccessible, really.

“I wanted to examine the body in situ, I didn’t want it moved away until I had the chance to examine it.

“We didn’t think I would fit in the space as it was so small but in the end I squeezed into the hatch.

“Looking in, you could see Angelika’s legs, her waist, the top half of her body obscured by bin bags and green tarpaulin.

“I could see her hands, bound to her side and heavily blood stained. The fly of her trousers was undone.

“My initial assessment was that it was likely to be a sexually motivated murder.

“The way her legs were crumpled behind her, she’d been dropped into the deposition site from above.

“We recovered semen from her body, which matched Peter Tobin’s.

“But his defence was that he’d had sex with her and then someone else had murdered her. With Tobin, it became very focused on whether we could link the violence to the intercourse. Gradually it became a very strong forensic case.” Tobin was convicted and sentenced to life with a minimum of 21 years in 2007.

Carol admits that the circumstances surrounding the murder of Moira Jones in Queen’s Park in 2008 resonated with her in a way that not all her cases do.

She said: “It was shocking to me as a woman of a similar age to Moira that this happened. A young woman going about her business, snatched off the street outside her house and taken into the park, raped, murdered. So tragic.”

When a sexual motive is suspected, the ability to link sexual intercourse to the violence becomes key to the prosecution, explained Carol.

“You get to the scene and work your way towards the body, but we had a lot of work to do a lot of evidence to recover before we could start sampling Moira’s body. There would have been a point when Moira knew what was happening to her and I just hope that was a very small period of time.”

Slovakian Harcar was found guilty of the murder and jailed for life in 2009 after blood stains on his leather jacket matched her DNA.

Carol, from Fife, was inspired to pursue a career in forensics after watching 80s TV crime series Indelible Evidence. But she’s quick to reject the notion that her job should be seen as glamorous in any way. She said: “There’s nothing ‘cool’ about it. I was at a crime scene in Glasgow the other week in torrential rain, first thing in the morning, freezing, soaking. A wee wummin came and gave me a cup of tea. That’s CSI Glasgow.

“On TV, they go into someone’s house, question them and then it’s over in an hour. The average scene I’m on is in a drug addict’s house in the middle of the night. These programmes get it all wrong, it’s all back to front.

“They’re all out there in their good gear with their make-up on. I’m out with my hair scraped back and old clothes on. They glamorise it. It’s unrealistic. We gets kids phoning up saying they want to come and speak to you because they want to be forensic scientists but don’t want to work in a lab.

“Your day is working in a lab – normally looking at dirty knickers or trousers someone has pooed in.

“So if you think that’s glamorous, then aye, it’s glamorous. The average murder is two guys, best pals, one’s had too much to drink, one stabs the other, he’s going to jail, the other’s dead, two lives and families destroyed, over drink, drugs, a girl, a pair of trainers. It’s awful.